The snows of yesteryear

One of the various good things to come out of the Winder book about Germany last noticed at reference 1, was a reference to a memoir by one Gregor von Rezzori, reference 2 below. A central European classic no less.

What we have is a fabulised memoir of a childhood partly spent in and around Czernowitz, just south of the River Prut, capital of Bukovina, at the beginning a north eastern outpost of the Austrian Empire and at the end part of Rumania. Before that in the Ottoman sphere of influence and after that split between Rumania and the Ukraine.

The memoir comes in five main parts, each telling overlapping stories from a different point of view: Cassandra, the Rumanian nurse; the mother; the father; the sister; and, Bunchy, the German governess. The parents appear to come of good family in the upper middle reaches of Austro-Hungarian life. With the civil servant father being posted out to Bukovina, rather as a contemporary Englishman might have been posted out to Burma.

A technique which I believe is common enough these days, with references 4 and 5 being examples which come to mind. I was reading reference 4 more than a decade ago, as noticed at reference 6, and was last noticed in 2018 at reference 7. I think it has been culled since.

An interesting memoir, from what was then a very mixed region about which I know very little. A memoir which makes a point of exploring the sometimes tenuous relations between memory and the truth, whatever that might amount to in this sort of context. A chap who comes from a very odd family, odd enough that it is a wonder he survived into more or less normal adulthood. The father, for example, is a hunting nut whose hero is a chap who writes a 700 page tome on the partridge.

It seems that he spent the second world war in Berlin, being exempt from the German call up as he was a Rumanian citizen, and wound up in Italy, perhaps harking back to his family's distant origins in Sicily, at one time a southern outpost of the Austrian empire.

But I ended the first reading rather dissatisfied, feeling that I did not have a proper grip on the narrative of his life, of its chronology. As I observed recently about films, I like them to march steadily forward in time, without a lot of jumping about. Was he hiding lots of bad stuff?

Where, for example, were the Jews of Bukovina, who scarcely get a mention beyond what Rezzori reports as the risible anti-Semitism of his father? For whom see reference 3, where lots of material is listed, mostly not in English and mostly, as far as I could tell, not available online. There is also the observation, from a Rezzori visit to Czernowitz in 1989, after some decades of absence, that what had been a famously mixed town, with a great jumble of people all jammed together, had been cleaned up and looked 100% Ukrainian.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/02/aachen-barbarossaleuchter-revisted.html.

Reference 2: The snows of yesteryear - Gregor von Rezzori

Reference 3: http://jgaliciabukovina.net/. The source for the map above.

Reference 4: The Alexandria Quartet - Lawrence Durrell - 1957-1960,

Reference 5: The woodcutter and his family - Frank McGuinness - 2017.

Reference 6 : https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2008/11/more-durrell.html.

Reference 7: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/thank-you-tescos.html.